I did cut and paste and it's possible I picked up an extraneous char but I tried it several times and did some variations like with and without the trailing slash, so I ought to have caught a trailing space. I did notice that the reported path looked munged.
Anyway, the VMWARE method worked well. I'm building, editing, executing, etc. under it. Now I'm trying to get SAMBA networking going between windows and the VMWARE image.
I still have the partial CYGWIN installation and one of these days I'll take another stab at completing it as it would seem to offer a little more flexibility although I may be perfectly satisfied with the VMWARE approach as I gain more experience with it.